Most of their videos are in Mandarin (but occasionally in Japanese or English with Chinese subtitles). The content and diverse as the two videos below from the very same week— no matter what they cover, the quality always seems to be high!

I’m taking advantage of the Summer term and taking an intensive version of an introductory Linguistics (Linguistic Analysis) course at the university where I work; I’m basically trading my lunch hour for this class for 6 weeks– good fun!

So good! Another gem from 一条 YIT. Their mini-videos don’t seem to stick to a predetermined theme and frequently end up being wonderfully unique and authentic.

(5 min video—Mandarin w/ English Subtitles).

“In 2015, unwed female artist Guo Yingguang above the average of marriage had an experience at the famous blind date corner in Shanghai People’s Park. She was shocked by the crowd of parents and the dating ads.

She began to do research, and created a piece of performance art: she posted an ad to promote herself in order to find a date, but she got laughed at. She took pictures and video of these scenes, and made a series of photographs called “The Happiness of Obedience”.”

I saw this wonderful video about a 77-year-old kitesurfer this morning, and it somehow reminded me of “The Summer Day”, the Mary Oliver poem that delicately lands on a simple but powerful question:

Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

If you haven’t heard the poem before (artist reading below), give it a listen. I usually make notes about other languages here, but both of these videos are solid reminders of the poetry of life and the beauty of the English language– I shouldn’t take it for granted!

It had actually been coming for awhile— ‘life’ was speeding up and the daily check-in with Duolingo was becoming more of an “oh yeah~ I almost forgot!”. First I changed my daily commitment to a lower number to minimize the time needed to maintain the streak— then, I ‘froze’ my streak a couple of times (i.e. the system showed that my streak was still intact, when I had, in fact, missed a day) by exchanging some of my system credits (just free gems/etc. that I’d picked up through engaging with the platform); today, however, the inevitable happened and I realized that I hadn’t even been on the system for two days [sigh]–the picture below is how Duolingo greeted me.

It’s all good– I was preoccupied with real things, so I don’t need to feel bad about dropping the ball. I don’t think I’ll take them up on their offer to repair my streak for a fee ($9.99), but I think take it as an opportunity to pause and see whether I’m going to try and get back on the horse, or try something different. I like the Duolingo platform—-I think for my learning style though, it can’t be the engine that maintains or sustains my connection to the language. I’ll just have to think about where it fits in the ecosystem.

As for the streak– I’ve been at this game long enough to know that, in the long run, the key skill that keeps you moving forward is being able to pick yourself up again after you inevitably stumble. As the Japanese proverb says— “Fall down seven times, get up eight times” (七転び八起き)

Not to get sucked into politics, but Trump’s alleged comments about immigrants from “Shithole countries” were apparently paired with comments about wishing that there were more Norwegians immigrating to the U.S.A.

In terms of a reality-check, there was a piece in the Atlantic that nicely covered why that isn’t likely to happen–(spoiler: Norway is one of the few countries in the world that consistently beats Canada (yes, and the U.S. too) on UN Development index, happiness rankings and other measures). Still, I was curious to see what Norwegian people were saying about this chapter of current events— how would you even say “shithole country” in Norwegian?

Looking for iphone apps, I discovered a free NRK (Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation) radio app and gave it a whirl. Fumbling around the menu, I tried a few channels and left it on a show called “Språkteigen” while I was doing something else. During a music break between segments, I heard what was obviously the Norwegian version of “What the world needs now, is love, sweet love”. As luck would have it, the app showed the name of the song so I took a screen shot (“Nå skal du få kjærlighet”, by Kirsti Sparboe). I’m a relatively new Apple Music subscriber and it seemed like a cool bonus to find her album there.

I’m a bit of a guitar hack so I found the lyrics to the song and the tab to the original song and put the tab for the chorus together (below). It’ll be worth a laugh to try and play the chorus on my guitar in the next while.

I’ve been following a channel called (一条 YIT）on Facebook for a little while— their videos are incredible! I didn’t realize that FB videos worked on this platform, but here we are. Check out this Chinese-language (English Subtitled) video about Yan Shaoting, who won the Best of the Best of the Red Dot Design Award for this work.

Just continuing to capture these baby steps of learning Norwegian; this project started off on such a whim—it’s been a delight to watch it build a bit of momentum. (Not forgetting the obvious caveat that this is still early days for sure–I’m determined to maintain my Duolingo streak until I finish the course!)

Random moment this week though—we were over at a friend’s house and the kids were surfing videos on YouTube; suddenly, I spotted an “ikke” (familiar word from Duolingo lessons) in the “up next” preview box…. I jumped up to snap a picture (below) so I could check it out when I got home—lo and behold, Google Translate confirmed that “Verschrikkelijke Ikke” is the Norwegian title for the Despicable Me movies!

There aren’t any Norwegian speakers in that house (Just Persian, Arabic and English), so it seemed extra serendipitous to be having a “Norwegian moment”.

The next day my French news app (Le Monde) popped up a headline with another Norway connection. Trivial as it was, it was yet another reminder of how, for all the effort that we put into deliberate language practice (i.e. I found the NRK radio app), the universe/language/culture/community always seems to repay our efforts with these kinds of connections from time to time.